Documentary on Aborigines wins top award in US

Staff writer, with CNA

A documentary on an Aboriginal community in Taiwan on Monday received a George Foster Peabody Award, which honors excellence in the electronic media.

Susan Yu (游淑靜), an official at the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in New York, accepted the award on behalf of Public Television Service (PTS) and IFA Coproduction, for the documentary A Year in the Clouds (司馬庫斯).

The film chronicles how the people of Smangus, an Atayal tribe in the deep mountains in Hsinchu County, learned to live a collective life that is harmonious with nature, Yu said in the acceptance speech in New York.

The documentary, which took PTS a year to produce, is also a touching story about how Aborigines preserve their traditions in modern times, she said.

Yu invited the audience to visit Taiwan to see the beautiful area around Hsinchu.

“Beautifully photographed, the film records a year among indigenous Taiwanese mountain people who rely on ecotourism, and shared ownership of land and property, to support their communal way of life,” the awards’ Web site said.

The film also won the Silver World Medal in the environment and ecology category of the New York Festivals’ International Television and Film Awards last month. It has also been nominated for the Rockies Program Competition at the Banff World Media Festival in Canada, PTS said.

This type of recognition shows that international audiences have been deeply moved by the uniqueness of Taiwanese Aborigines, PTS added.

Among the other 45 winners of the 71st Peabody Awards were Surviving the Tsunami by Japan’s NHK; CNN’s Reporting on the Arab Spring; and CBS Evening News with Scott Pelley: Inside Syria.